Small and medium-sized companies sometimes think that disaster planning is only for larger corporations, but recent changes in technology make such planning affordable for almost all business sizes. In fact, small businesses today can’t afford to be without such planning.

As a small business owner, you should have three goals when it comes to disaster planning: ensuring that you never lose critical data, minimizing downtime, and recovering as quickly as possible in the event of a disaster.

Those actions fall into three different categories: backups, disaster recovery, and business continuity.

What’s the difference?

• Backing up is the process of safeguarding your data by copying it to a safe medium for recovery in the event of loss.

• Disaster recovery is the process of restoring operations that are critical to your business after a disaster occurs.

• Business continuity is the creation of a plan that details how your organization will recover and restore interrupted functions after a disaster.

Business continuity is the most comprehensive of these three functions, because it involves much more than just a discussion of IT issues – it’s a detailed action plan. Certainly, you need to consider how you protect your IT infrastructure and data, but you also need to consider what you and your employees should do if a disaster occurs. Do your employees know where to meet in the event of a building evacuation? Do you have a plan for reaching out to all employees and their emergency contacts to communicate critical information? Do you have a way to communicate to customers when and how you’ll resume providing products or services? What will you do if one of your major suppliers experiences a disaster?

It’s hard to underestimate the importance of these three plans, but many small and medium businesses do. That’s because when most people think of disaster, they think of floods, earthquakes, and fires. They may even consider equipment failures. But there are human-induced disasters as well—for example, disgruntled or incompetent employees who delete critical information, or hackers. It could easily happen to you.

Perhaps you have a backup system in place. Maybe you even have backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity plans. But because business goals and environments change, any plan needs to be re-evaluated from time to time to make sure it’s still meeting all of your needs. We can help you evaluate your current plans, or sort through the options if you don’t yet have plans. Contact us for today for details.

Managed IT services are the technology solution of choice for large businesses, but many small and medium businesses remain resistant to considering this approach. Below are five reasons you may want to change your mind.

Reason #1:  You need to control costs. In today’s economic environment, IT budgets have been slashed—but a cut in IT spending doesn’t come with a cut in demand for IT services. As a result, you have to do the same amount of work with fewer resources. Although managed services might cost more in the short-term, they cost far less in the long term once you account for the domino effect of lost productivity and customer dissatisfaction.

Reason #2:  IT complexity is increasing. The breadth of information technology a company requires places small- to mid-sized businesses at a distinct disadvantage. Equipment is constantly upgraded in the market, and new IT-related specialties are emerging in a variety of areas, from telephony to networking. It’s difficult for small businesses to maintain the expertise necessary to properly manage these new technologies.

Reason #3:  You’re more dependent than ever on IT. At the same time, companies have become dramatically more dependent on IT in the past few years—and increased use of IT leads to increased outages and greater loss of productivity.

Reason #4:  Your existing solutions are inefficient. In today’s world, a one- or-two person in-house IT department or consultancy simply cannot handle the occasional IT breakdowns that are bound to occur. In many cases, employees have to wait in line to receive help. As a result, not only are your employees less productive, their morale is also decreased—and unhappy employees are less productive employees.

Reason #5:  You need to maintain compliance. More and more companies are finding themselves subject to regulatory compliance, from Sarbanes-Oxley to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)—and most small businesses don’t have the resources to fully understand the requirements of these regulations, let alone comply with them.

Of course, the best reason to consider managed IT services may be that IT isn’t your specialty. If managing IT infrastructure has absolutely nothing to do with your core competency, why wouldn’t you outsource it to an expert? By implementing managed services, you can utilize your internal IT resources for other purposes, such as supporting your strategic business objectives.

With more and more people and organisations accessing the Internet, and as the potential uses of the web grows, the way business is done is naturally evolving as well.

One example of this is the emergence of cloud computing services. In essence, this is the outsourcing of an organization’s IT services to a different company. Everything is managed through the Internet – through “the cloud”, hence the term.

There are three things that make cloud computing services different from usual hosting services:

• The company only pays for the resources they use.
• Subscribers can adjust the amount of service they get based on their need.
• The service is completely managed by the service provider.

Cloud computing services also include providing virtual data storage – meaning you store your data off site on the cloud service provider’s secure servers. You can, however, still access your data through the Internet.

There are both private and public cloud services. A public cloud service is available to everyone on the Internet, while private services are only available to specific clientèle. Some cloud services use public clouds to provide private service, making them a virtual private cloud computing service.

The increasing use of the web in our personal and social lives as well as in business gives the trend of cloud computing services vast potential. However, this service is not for everyone – for instance, if you have reservations about keeping sensitive information in a location outside your organization, you might want to pass.

Want to learn the pros and cons of cloud computing services for your business model? Give us a call – we’d be happy to discuss a possible cloud computing road map with you.

When you want to thank loyal customers and reconnect with friends, greeting cards offer a great way to reinforce the personal link between you and them. Using Microsoft Office Publisher 2007, you can quickly produce exactly the greeting card that you want.

Learn how…

Typically, reminders are associated with tasks and deadlines. However, reminders are versatile and can be used with calendar items, e-mail messages, and contacts as well as tasks.

Learn how…

I was with a customer recently and we recently installed a new application for them on Windows 7, that required us to run a program as Administrator. It seemed the only way this would work was to right click on the icon and “Run as Administrator” so I wanted to find a way that this could be done without right clicking on the icon, and this is what I found, on the internet:

The best way to do this, is to create a scheduled task, and then set up a shortcut that tells the scheduled task to run. I am sure there are better ways to do this but this seems to work just fine.

Start by Creating the Scheduled Task Item

Open up Task Scheduler through the start menu search box (in Windows 7 search just type “task” without the quotes ), and then on the right-hand side click the “Create Task” link:

Now all you need to do is to give the task a name, something simple preferably without any spaces in it. Then check the box for “Run with highest privileges” (*very important*). If you are using Windows 7, click on the “Configure for” dropdown list and select the option for Windows 7.

Next , click on the Actions tab, click the New button, and then browse down to the application that you are trying to start.

Close out of the dialogs by clicking the OK button, which should create the new task in the list. You can right-click on it and choose “Run” at this point, simply to make sure that it launches the application the way you were expecting.

At this point our scheduled tasks setup is done, so you can close out of that if you want, as long as you remember the name that you used for the task.

Create the Shortcut to Start the Task

Right-click anywhere on the desktop and choose New \ Shortcut from the menu.

Now here is where the real magic happens, we need to add a command that will run the scheduled task, passing in the name of the task that we used. As you can see, I used runregedit as the name for the task.

Make sure you enter the task name like this, replacing the capitalized letters for the name of your task. (It’s not case sensitive)

schtasks /run /tn “TASKNAMEINQUOTES” this is the name you gave the task when we created it, in this case “runregedit”

Now give your shortcut some useful name, and then click next to create it.

Viola, you now have an icon created that will launch the application in administrator mode.

As of 15th January 2010, Vodafone will release the APPLE iPhone to work on their network which means that you can now ANY iphone on the 4 networks that offer it whether or not it was supplied by your provider.

In order to do this, you will need to  get your existing iphone unlocked by visiting the  unlocking site of the provider, which in our case is O2, available at http://shop.o2.co.uk/update/unlockmyiphone.html.. Fill in the relevant information and in a couple of weeks, they will unlock the it  and then it will be available for use on any network.  Once you then synch with iTunes, you will be able to update the carrier settings and you are good to go.

Should you need any assistance on this,  please feel free to give us a call .

This week, like many other people , we have been affected by really bad snow and have been unable to get into the office and so have had to work from home.

However this does not mean that we have been unable to do any work,  because of the technology available today, we have been able to 100% effective and continue to be productive.

We have our systems set up to use Outlook, share files and folders with the workforce and also have our telephone extensions available at home, so that we can continue to communicate with each other as though we were in the office.  

The great news is that most small companies  have all, or most of this technology already available on the server, and  its a something that just needs to be setup.

So if your staff are unable to get into the office, rather than give them a day off (and watch TV or play in the snow) why not  let them remain productive ?

If you would like to know more about this then why not give us a call, so that we can set this up for you, and next time it  snows you wont get caught short. 

Why not visit our website and download our whitepaper entitled “Small Business Mobility”, it can be downloaded here

A new report by security vendor Cenzic shares research indicating that security flaws found in Web applications continue to grow and should be a major concern for many businesses, including SMEs, as more and more depend on the Web for their business. According to the report, almost 80 percent of more than 3,000 software security flaws publicly reported this year have been in web technologies such as web servers, applications, plug-ins, and web browsers. That number is about 10 percent higher than the number of flaws reported in the same period last year — and 9 out of 10 of the flaws were found in commercial code. The top 10 vulnerabilities for the first half of 2009 included familiar names such as Sun, IBM, Mozilla, Apache, and Safari, where most Web applications were found to have vulnerabilities related to information leaks and exposures, Cross-Site Scripting, and session management.

Are you using the web for your business? Concerned about the security of your data and information? Contact us and see how we can help.

Related articles:

• Web application security is growing problem for enterprises (infoworld.com)
• Firefox flaws make up 44% of all browser bugs? (theregister.co.uk)
• Vulnerabilities Whitehat Security (ecombizcenter.blogspot.com)

Quoting research from various industry analysts, Microsoft warned that users who install unlicensed or counterfeit software on their PCs are 73% more likely to suffer data loss or damage than users of legitimate software. The company also cited a 2006 IDC study that found that 25% of counterfeit software attempted to install unwanted or malicious code when downloaded. In response, Microsoft is launching a series of educational initiatives and enforcement actions in over 70 countries to combat the threat. Microsoft is calling its anti-piracy campaign Consumer Action Day. Microsoft has posted additional information about the risks of counterfeit software and its efforts to fight the problem at microsoft.com/howtotell.

Related articles:

• Counterfeit reports climb (robbiz1978.blogspot.com)
• Microsoft launches attack on pirates, counterfeiters (seattlepi.com)
• Microsoft Links Malware Rates To Pirated Windows (news.slashdot.org)